Founders of Experimental Psychology: Wilhelm Wundt and William James

Wilhelm Wundt, acclaimed as “the father of experimental
psychology”, established the first psychological research and
teaching laboratory within the Philosophy Department at Leipzig in
around 1876 (Fancher, 1996). He regarded his psychology as a branch
of philosophy, an attempt to apply the experimental methods of
natural science (particularly, the physiology of Helmholtz) to
essentially philosophical problems concerning the nature of mind and
its metaphysical status. This view of the subject persisted, in
Germany, at least until the Nazi era. Wundt's research program aimed
to investigate the “elements of consciousness,” and the
laws governing the combination of these elements (Wundt, 1912).
Although his theoretical system made a place for emotional
feelings as one class of element, in practice the main focus
of Wundt's experimentally based research program was on the elements
of sensation and their compounding into ideas. As
has been the case in the Empiricist philosophical tradition, these
ideas were conceived of as, to all intents and purposes,
mental images. Indeed, Wundt insists, much in the spirit of Hume,
that there is no fundamental difference in kind between the ideas
arising directly from perception and “memory images”
(Wundt, 1912). Thus, Wundtian experimental psychology was largely a
study of cognitive processes, and, for him (and most of his numerous
students and imitators), the mental image (under the rubric
idea) played essentially the same crucial, representational
role in cognition that it had played for most of his philosophical
predecessors.

Wundt's American counterpart, and contemporary, William James, took a
not dissimilar view, although he was careful to acknowledge that in
some people the “thought stuff,” as he called it, might
consist not so much of visual imagery as of imagery of other
modes, especially the “verbal images” of inner speech
(James, 1890 ch. 18). In his textbook The Principles of
Psychology (1890) James has much that is insightful to say about
psychological processes in general, and about the role of imagery in
them in particular, but, although he presented experimental
demonstrations in the course of his psychology teaching at Harvard,
James had little interest in the actual pursuit of experimental
research, and established no graduate teaching program in
experimental psychology (Fancher, 1996). Thus, despite the lucidity
of his justly famous text, and the wide readership it has continued
to find, his direct influence on the disciplinary development of
scientific psychology, even in his native America, probably never
equaled that of Wundt (or even lesser German pioneers, such as G.E.
Müller), who trained many Americans (as well as many Germans,
and students of other nationalities) in the techniques of
experimental research. Just around this time, when psychology was the
latest intellectual fashion, the American Universities were
undergoing a tremendous expansion. Thus many of these students were
able to return from Germany to the United States to found
experimental psychology teaching programs of their own. It was
because of this, much more than the intellectual influence of James,
that the U.S.A., well before it grew into a dominant world power and
achieved its current leadership in the sciences generally, quickly
grew to rival, and eventually surpass, Germany's initial preeminence
in scientific psychology.

Although psychologists of this era have often been portrayed (notably
by Boring (1950)) as using an introspective methodology, in fact
Wundt, in particular, was very sensitive to standard criticisms of
introspection, such as the contention that the very attempt to
observe our own mental activities will itself alter them. He thus
limited its use to situations where he was satisfied that the causes
of the relevant mental events, the experimental stimuli, could be
strictly controlled and the results shown to be replicable, with any
introspective reports being made unreflectively, as soon as the
relevant content appeared in the mind (Mischel, 1970; Danziger,
1980). Wundt's research did not rely upon discursive
descriptions of mental contents. An “introspective”
report in his laboratory might typically have involved no more than
indicating the moment when a certain sensation entered consciousness,
or saying whether a musical tone seemed higher or lower than the one
presented just before. Such “introspective reports”
differ little from the sorts of responses that might be called for in
many modern cognitive psychology experiments. Wundt's methodological
discipline meant that the data collected in his laboratory were
primarily such things as reaction times or discrimination thresholds,
rather than introspective accounts of inner contents or processes; it
also meant, in practice, that his experiments were restricted almost
entirely to the study of “lower” psychological processes,
principally sensation and perception. Thus, although Wundt did hold
that “higher” mental process, such as thought and memory,
depended largely upon mental images (including verbal imagery, silent
speech), in practice his experimental work did little directly to
illuminate these. “Higher” mental processes, for Wundt,
were best investigated non-experimentally, via a methodology that he
called völkerpsychologie, a hermeneutic study of
cultural products to which he devoted much of his later career, but
which never achieved anything like the influence of his
experimentally based work.

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